


Scars

by MissMorwen



Series: BuckyNat Prompts [24]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel 616, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: #BuckyNat Week, F/M, POV Natasha Romanov, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Pre-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Tumblr Prompt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-25
Updated: 2019-03-25
Packaged: 2019-12-07 15:17:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,676
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18236672
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MissMorwen/pseuds/MissMorwen
Summary: “You gonna tell Steve you found me?” For the first time he speaks without the hard edge to his voice.It doesn’t surprise her, shouldn’t hurt her like it does. He grew up with Steve, knew him for years, only spent a few a few months with her. A brief, dumb fling doesn’t compare to years of a friendship so close that Steve speaks about him like a long-lost brother.***********Buckynat prompt: "I'll show you mine if you show me yours first / Let's compare scars, I'll tell you who’s is worse" - preferably set between TWS and CW, with Natasha checking in on Bucky who's on the run, and preferably pre-relationship (at least present day ;))





	Scars

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MedeaV](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MedeaV/gifts).



The Winter Soldier walks into a Hydra stronghold and he doesn't walk out again.

It sounds like the beginning of a joke, and a bad one at that, but Natasha isn't laughing when she hears it. She checks and double-checks, and sure enough, the footage shows the Winter Soldier walking into an underground facility in Ukraine. The one she’s been keeping an eye on for a while now.

It’s… not good news. Not for Steve and not for the world. She tells her informant to stay away, takes a Quinjet to Ukraine, and heads towards the facility on her own. There are no signs of the guards when she arrives, no signs of life inside except for the utter destruction of equipment. Screens are smashed, computers and hard-drives ground down into bits of metal and plastic. Not even the furniture is left intact.

It annoys Natasha a little. She kept an eye on the facility to make sure she got their suppliers and maybe access to other fraction, too, not just this one stronghold. But at least he hasn’t left dead bodies in his wake. The twenty-one Hydra agents that work here, have all been locked inside one of the rooms, the door barricaded with a giant fridge. Five round dimples on the left side of it tell her plainly who put it there, in case she’s wondering.

There’s no sign of the Winter Soldier himself, though, other than a busted-open air shaft that exits somewhere east of the compound. She didn’t expect the him to hang around. Not if Steve is correct in his assumptions about him. But she had hoped. Tracking him isn’t an easy task, even with the limited resources he has these days. She knows, she’s tried it before. It doesn’t matter. She sets to work and decides to not tell Steve about it before she’s sure.

 

She finds him again in Odessa. (Why does it have to be Odessa? Is he returning to the scene of the crime because he knew that she would take the bait or is it just pure, cruel chance?) Walking down a busy street not four days after she set out. There are a lot of ways to go about this and Natasha picks the one she won’t feel bad telling Steve about: in plain sight and giving him the opportunity to bolt if he wants to. She makes sure he spots him before she stops by a bakery, pretends to look at the cakes on display.

He stops out of reach, but so close she can hear him when he says, “What do you want?”

She doesn’t say to check if you were dead or back to working Hydra. “A word. If you don’t mind.”

“And if I do mind?”

She shrugs.

He drops the facade of looking at the window, turns his head, and stares at her.

“I’m getting some sochnyky,” says Natasha and walks around him in a wide arc. She doesn’t pretend this is about giving him another chance to bolt, she doesn’t have a habit of lying to herself. She does, however, use the brief respite to work on the knot in her stomach, so that she’s relaxed again by the time she has a paper bag filled with cookies in her hand.

He’s still outside when she returns, and she doesn’t breathe a sigh of relief because his eyes are fixed on her and he’s not one to miss something as obvious as that.

“Okay,” he says and turns, not waiting for her to follow.

It’s interesting to watch him move through the city. The swagger that Bucky Barnes and the Winter Soldier has in common is gone and with the worn clothes and cap, few people take notice of him. The ones that do have forgotten about him before he’s past. It’s no wonder Steve can’t track him down. He is just an ordinary man walking down the street, keeping all his extraordinariness in check. It makes her happier than she has any right to.

The building he takes her to is nothing like what Natasha would have guessed. Which is probably why he picked it. A high-rise painted sickly yellow with air-conditions attached to the outside wall of several of the apartments.

There are three locks on his door, but since his neighbors has four locks, this isn’t out of the ordinary. The interior is painfully bare-boned. There’s a mattress on the floor, a table and two chairs separating the kitchenette from the rest, and little else. She doesn’t judge, she’s stayed in worse places and at least it’s clean.

“This is where you live these days?” she asks when he continues his silent treatment.

“No, this is where I’ve been sleeping for a few days while casing that Hydra basement.”

She puts the paper bag on the kitchen counter, leaves it there. Maybe he’ll eat them when she’s left, maybe he’ll throw them away. She doesn’t care either way, they have served their purpose.

“You gonna tell Steve you found me?” For the first time he speaks without the hard edge to his voice.

It doesn’t surprise her, shouldn’t hurt her like it does. He grew up with Steve, knew him for years, only spent a few a few months with her. A brief, dumb fling doesn’t compare to years of a friendship so close that Steve speaks about him like a long-lost brother.

“Do you want me to?” Natasha asks when she has her voice back under control.

“I’m not the guy he used to know.”

“People rarely are.”

He hears something in her voice she didn’t mean to put there, it’s easy to tell from the twitch in his right hand, his eyes roam her face. “I guess not.”

Natasha leans back against the kitchen counter, her hands gripping the edge of it, rests her head against the cupboards so her shirt rides up an inch or two to show a sliver of the ugly scar on her stomach.

It works as intended. The odd expression on his face slips off and his Adam’s apple bobs. It’s a stronger reaction that she aimed for and that alone is better news than she had dared hoped. “Did I— I did that, didn’t I?”

“I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.” She pushes off from the counter, steps closer to him.

“What?”

It’s a dangerous game. The gun at the small of her back is all but useless this close, her knives out of reach in her boots, only her stingers might give her a fighting chance, should he chose to attack. But Natasha has never gotten anywhere in life by playing it safe. She slips a hand under his jacket and traces a line along his ribs over his shirt. “I gave you this one while sparring. You insisted that I shouldn’t hold back, so I didn’t.” She shrugs. The memory is a happy one, despite the blood and their surroundings, but she struggles to keep her voice even. She retracts her hand from the warmth under his jacket and pushes his hair back to trace an almost invisible line near his hairline by his ear. “Now, this is from Paris, but I don’t kiss and tell, so you’ll have to work that one out on your own.”

“ _Natalia_ ,” he says in Russian. The blue of his eyes is like ice in the cold light, but his expression is anything but. His hand brush against the sleeve of her shirt, but when he reaches her shoulder where the second scar he gave is, he drops it again. Like his hand is too heavy for him to lift.

“ _None of that now, Soldier, I’m just glad to see you’re still alive_.”

“ _I thought_ —” he stops, shakes his head, switches to English. “I thought they had put it there to… I don’t know, manipulate me. Fuck with my head.”

It takes all Natasha’s willpower to keep her hands relaxed by her side. She has had years to dig through her memories, years to work out what happened and why. He hasn’t. “They tended to erase memories, not put new ones in. At least in my experience.” She tries to smile but it feels like a mask.

His eyes jump from her eyes to her mouth to her shoulder, back again. He works his jaw, the muscle bouncing with it. Uncertainty painted on his every feature, making it hard for her to breathe.

She turns away from him, picks up a pen and paper on the table, and writes down her phone number. “Now you have my number, if you need anything. To talk. Anything. Call me and I’ll do my best to help.” She only watches him in the periphery of her vision as he remains immobile, looking down at the floor.

She has her hand on the door handle when he finally says, “Thank you.”

Natasha turns back, smiles a smile that feels somewhat more natural, says, “All in a day’s work.”

“No. For… for everything back then.” He exhales with what might be a huff of laughter. “For not killing me in DC.”

“It wasn’t for lack of trying.”

“Yeah it was.” He looks calmer now, nails her to the door with his eyes.

Oh. She swallows. “Well, the same to you.” She touches the scar on her stomach.

“How do you know I didn’t try my hardest either?”

“Because I’m still breathing.”

He huffs again, drops his head. “Yeah, well, I can’t take credit for that. Only remember the aftermath.”

“Maybe it’ll come back to you,” she says hoping it won’t, to spare him the pain of that memory. “Anyway, call me if you need anything. Anything at all.”

He smiles ruefully and it’s like looking straight at the past. “I will.”

It’s a promise. One she hopes he’ll keep. Natasha closes the door behind her and does her best not to take the stairs two or three steps at a time. It’s a promise and it gives her hope for the future.


End file.
